Universal Emulators Return

webmilhouse writes "Wired has an article about Transitive Corporation that claims their software "allows any software application binary to run on any processor/operating system" without any performance hit. That would allow any program written for Windows to run on Linux or Mac, and vice-versa, which Wired likened to digital alchemy. The Transitive software is supposed to be released today. What do you think, vaporware or miracle?"

Comments

Re:no performance hit?

[AKAImBatman]

that's not possible, just translating to another set of instructions takes some of the cpu's resources

According to TFA, this is a pre-compiler/translator, not an emulator. i.e. The entire program is recompiled for another platform using only the binary data as the source. This is theoretically possible and has been attempted many times, but such compilers often trip over levels of indirection that programmers add.

For example, a programmer might place the video address in a variable, then reference that for screen paints. Such a trick would be impossible to detect at compile time, and would only be properly handled by a true emulator.

Answer from Transitive's Website

[mofochickamo]

Transitive explains the architechure of their system here. Basically, to support APIs on different operating systems they have what is called an Operating System Mapper. They don't claim that it maps Mac to Windows or Linux to Windows. Basically, it maps two like systems together (like Solaris to AIX or HPUX to Linux). If there is no straightforward mapping then the customer defines the map.

After reading this, the term Universal Emulator doesn't seem to apply. Here is the text from Transitive's Website:

Operating System Mapper. Dynamite supports operating system mapping between any two Unix/Linux-like operating systems, as well as mapping between mainframe and any Unix/Linux-like operating systems. Where similar operating system calls exist between the source and destination operating system, Dynamite maps calls between the two. Where an equivalent operating system call doesn't exist in the target environment, Dynamite maps to similar calls per the customer's guidance. Dynamite also monitors certain system calls, for example thread scheduling and memory mapping calls, to ensure that it can reproduce the complete behaviour of the program it is executing.

Re:Not Vapor and not the arrival of Christ

[grantsellis]

Yes, it's not all they're making it out to be. The poster read the teaser instead of the article, not that we're surprised :)

QuickTransit fully supports accelerated 3-D graphics and about 80 percent computational performance on the main processor.

and

Analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group said Transitive benefits from the fact that most modern machines are fast enough to emulate each other without much affecting performance.

"Typically with emulation you take a big performance hit," he said. "Their big breakthrough is they are much more efficient ... but there's so much overhead anyway, you can pretty much put any software on any platform. The power user might notice the difference, but the other 95 percent won't notice."

so yes, it does affect performance. You take a 20% hit. The "almost no performance hit" means, in this context, "computers are fast enough that no one will notice unless they're doing something crazy like video editing. Go back to surfing slashdot."